IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/18094.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Managing the Impossible Trinity: The Case of Malaysia

Author

Listed:
  • Goh, Soo Khoon

Abstract

This paper discusses how Malaysia manages the impossible trinity, the conjecture that a country cannot simultaneously maintain an open capital account, an exchange rate stability and monetary policy independence. Only two out of these three goals can be mutually consistent and policy makers have to decide which third goal to give up. The paper shows how Malaysia adopts an intermediate regime -- a regime that enables policy makers to manage all the three goals simultaneously. The impact of the global financial crisis on the Malaysian economy and the policy options for Malaysia to deal with the recent huge capital outflows are discussed in this paper. The willingness by Bank Negara Malaysia to allow a certain extent of exchange rate adjustments in the face of current global crisis reflects that Malaysia is not exempted from the impossible trinity

Suggested Citation

  • Goh, Soo Khoon, 2009. "Managing the Impossible Trinity: The Case of Malaysia," MPRA Paper 18094, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:18094
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/18094/1/MPRA_paper_18094.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Maurice Obstfeld & Jay C. Shambaugh & Alan M. Taylor, 2005. "The Trilemma in History: Tradeoffs Among Exchange Rates, Monetary Policies, and Capital Mobility," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(3), pages 423-438, August.
    2. Vijay Joshi, 2003. "India and the Impossible Trinity," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(4), pages 555-583, April.
    3. Olivier Jeanne, 2007. "International Reserves in Emerging Market Countries: Too Much of a Good Thing?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 38(1), pages 1-80.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Maurice Obstfeld & Jay C. Shambaugh & Alan M. Taylor, 2010. "Financial Stability, the Trilemma, and International Reserves," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(2), pages 57-94, April.
    2. Joshua Aizenman, 2008. "Large Hoarding Of International Reserves And The Emerging Global Economic Architecture," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 76(5), pages 487-503, September.
    3. Amit Ghosh & Ramya Ghosh, 2012. "Capital controls, exchange rate regime and monetary policy independence in India," International Journal of Economic Policy in Emerging Economies, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 5(3), pages 212-230.
    4. Petar Vujanovic, 2011. "Understanding the Recent Surge in the Accumulation of International Reserves," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 866, OECD Publishing.
    5. Layal Mansour, 2014. "The Power of International Reserves: the impossible trinity becomes possible," Working Papers halshs-01054614, HAL.
    6. Chee-Hong Law, 2023. "The Impacts of International Reserves on Monetary Independence in Emerging Countries: An Asymmetric Analysis," Global Journal of Emerging Market Economies, Emerging Markets Forum, vol. 15(1), pages 53-71, January.
    7. Piotr Misztal, 2011. "The Feldstein-Horioka Hypothesis in Countries with Varied Levels of Economic Development," Contemporary Economics, University of Economics and Human Sciences in Warsaw., vol. 5(2), June.
    8. Georgiadis, Georgios & Zhu, Feng, 2021. "Foreign-currency exposures and the financial channel of exchange rates: Eroding monetary policy autonomy in small open economies?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    9. Linda S Goldberg, 2009. "Understanding Banking Sector Globalization," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 56(1), pages 171-197, April.
    10. Alfaro, Laura & Kanczuk, Fabio, 2009. "Optimal reserve management and sovereign debt," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(1), pages 23-36, February.
    11. Steiner, Andreas, 2013. "The accumulation of foreign exchange by central banks: Fear of capital mobility?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 38(PB), pages 409-427.
    12. Mr. Wendell A. Samuel & Emilio Pineda & Mr. Mario Dehesa, 2009. "Optimal Reserves in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union," IMF Working Papers 2009/077, International Monetary Fund.
    13. Caputo, Rodrigo, 2015. "Persistent real misalignments and the role of the exchange rate regime," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 135(C), pages 112-116.
    14. Ito, Hiro & Kawai, Masahiro, 2012. "New Measures of the Trilemma Hypothesis: Implications for Asia," ADBI Working Papers 381, Asian Development Bank Institute.
    15. Aizenman, Joshua & Sun, Yi, 2012. "The financial crisis and sizable international reserves depletion: From ‘fear of floating’ to the ‘fear of losing international reserves’?," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 250-269.
    16. Dominguez, Kathryn M.E., 2012. "Foreign reserve management during the global financial crisis," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(8), pages 2017-2037.
    17. Sushanta Mallick & Helena Marques, 2008. "Passthrough of Exchange Rate and Tariffs into Import Prices of India: Currency Depreciation versus Import Liberalization," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 16(4), pages 765-782, September.
    18. Kathryn Dominguez & Rasmus Fatum & Pavel Vacek, 2010. "Does foreign exchange reserve decumulation lead to currency appreciation?," Globalization Institute Working Papers 48, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
    19. Hail Park & Jong Chil Son, 2022. "Dollarization, inflation and foreign exchange markets: A cross‐country analysis," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(3), pages 2724-2736, July.
    20. Joshua Aizenman & Brian Pinto, 2013. "Managing Financial Integration and Capital Mobility—Policy Lessons from the Past Two Decades," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(4), pages 636-653, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Impossible Trinity; Malaysia; Global Financial Crisis;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F41 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - Open Economy Macroeconomics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:18094. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.